The Great Famine (Irish: an Gorta Mór meaning "the great hunger" or an Drochshaol meaning "the bad life") was a period of starvation, disease and mass emigration between 1845 and 1852 during which the population of Ireland was reduced by 20 to 25 percent. Approximately one million of the population died and a million more emigrated from Ireland's shores. The proximate cause of famine was a potato disease commonly known as potato blight.

Although blight ravaged potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s, the impact and human cost in Ireland—where a third of the population was entirely dependent on the potato for food—was exacerbated by a host of political, social and economic factors which remain the subject of historical debate. The famine was a watershed in the history of Ireland. Its effects permanently changed the island's demographic, political and cultural landscape.

For both the native Irish and those in the resulting diaspora, the famine entered folk memory and became a rallying point for various nationalist movements. Modern historians regard it as a dividing line in the Irish historical narrative, referring to the preceding period of Irish history as "pre-Famine." From 1801 Ireland had been directly governed, under the Act of Union, as part of the United Kingdom. Executive power lay in the hands of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Chief Secretary for Ireland, both of whom were appointed by the British government.

Ireland sent 105 members of parliament to the British House of Commons, and Irish representative peers elected twenty-eight of their own number to sit for life in the House of Lords. Between 1832 and 1859 seventy percent of Irish representatives were landowners or the sons of landowners.

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